Haley, 4/4/13:
Haley submitted the first draft of her second paper for this week’s meeting. She felt that it was “all over the place” and had no solid argument. I agreed that the paper lacked a solid organization and was, therefore, long and repetitive, but that I believed that the root of the problem was a confused argument and non-existent thesis. I started the meeting by laying the entire paper, printed out, in front of us. She had included bolded parentheses containing the paragraphs’ topics at the end of each paragraph, so we surveyed the topics and tried to identify what she was currently arguing. She quickly realized that her supposed thesis was no longer valid or relevant. We discussed possible arguments and she asked a few questions about how one could make an argument on an article with which they agree. While discussing the many possibilities, she stated that one of the articles was hard to argue about because she did not really understand it. After some discussion, we decided to eliminate this article from her paper. It was both too complicated and too divergent from the other article. She will look for another article, but I reiterated that I did not want her to spend too much time on the search process. I suggested that she look for a non-academic piece, such as a news story, instead of another complicated academic article. I think that a non-academic piece will be easier to include, will force her to discuss the implications and applications of her argument, and will give her practice integrating two varying sources. She liked this idea and we discussed the kind of article she could look for. I then had her write out a preliminary thesis. She found it much easier to talk about it than to write it out, but eventually wrote a fairly specific argument. We both agreed that it was a good start, but that it still seemed to lack tension. She could not identify a way to solve this problem, so I told her that I thought that writing a summary of the article would help her fully understand the material and identify how her argument does or does not go further than the article itself. We started to discuss organization, but stopped because she needed to first find an additional article and solidify her thesis. She will be using her first draft “for parts.” Haley has some hard work ahead of her, but she seemed prepared and motivated at the end of our meeting. Haley and I discussed her upcoming mid-semester grade as well as the joint meeting with Maud. She would like as much individual time with me as possible, so the joint meeting will be in addition to our normal meeting. We also discussed her third paper. She does not have any definite sources but we discussed and narrowed her topic and she is excited to write about it. Finally, I gave Haley a mid semester feedback form to complete for next week.
Maud, 4/4/13:
Maud wrote the first draft of her second paper for this week’s meeting. The draft was written clearly and contained very few sentence-level issues, but there were a few places where I thought that she needed to go one step further (this has become a common comment on her papers). However, the main issue was that her thesis did not seem to match up with her organization or accurately reflect her argument. We discussed most of my comments on her paper and, as usual, she asked many clarifying questions. We then discussed the limitations of her thesis. It turned out that I had read the thesis wrong (a perfect example of the danger of an unclear “this”!). In explaining the thesis to me, she realized that it did not fully express all that she wanted to say. She talked through her thoughts and, in doing so, became much clearer on the relationship between the three populations she is writing about. She often had a difficult time remembering what she had just said, but got stuck on grammar and sentence structure when I asked her to write as she spoke. I decided to write out her thoughts as she spoke them and this method worked for awhile. Once she had achieved some clarity, she was able to write her thoughts down herself. I brought up counter-arguments while she talked through her argument and she was able to argue against each one effectively and clearly. We discussed how she can include the counter-arguments in her paper. We realized that she had left out the second story of her thesis and that, as a result, her argument did not flow logically. I gave a mini “logic” lesson which she found helpful (If you are arguing that A is not C because it is not B, then you first need to establish that B is C.). After we had established a solid thesis and organization, we discussed her conclusion. It was mostly summary and only hinted at possible applications and implications of her argument. I gave her some suggestions, but she came up with her own idea which related nicely to the introduction. We then discussed the logistics of her joint meeting with Haley as well as her annotated bibliography for paper three. She will look up a paper each week. Finally, I gave Maud a mid semester feedback form to complete for next week.